Well, I believe you. And, I think my mother, her father, his father, his mother, her father, and his mother also believe you. We’re practically in fact-land! Just give it a few more generations.
I remember reading about a tribe in Africa (I think they were called the Dogones or something similar) who worshiped the star Sirius. They told some explorers/anthropologists (in the 1920s or 1930s maybe) about how Sirius is a binary star system, but they were just a primitive tribe - how did they know that? If you’re a UFO nut or other gullible person, you naturally think that they were visited by aliens from there.
Normal people would suggest that maybe the Dogones had heard about it from previous missionaries, who would possibly have known about Sirius being binary which had been discovered decades earlier, and upon seeing that the Dogones worshiped Sirius, informed them of this interesting tidbit.
So who told them - travelling missionaries, or space aliens? We may never know for sure.
Sounds like a muddled reference to the Dogon people of Mali, who allegedly knew about Sirius’ companion star despite having no telescopes to observe it.
In fact, Sirius wasn’t a binary star at all until sufficient people in that tribe believed it to be so for sufficient generations. Once you hit the Kuzari minimum, their folklore became TRUTH and Sirius became a binary star. I know this is true because I read it in a book and the book said it was true. Plus, that tribe commemorates the splitting of the star in a national holiday, and has done so, even though the commemorations are difficult, for many generations.
So we can’t simply trust thousands of people and their claims of miracles. More is needed to verify such claims - correct?
Wait, 2.5 million people? The population of the modern state of Israel is only 7.5 million!
Never mind.
Hm…I believe this would be it. Seems my memory (or the book I remember reading) was might have been wrong. I don’t think the wiki page is clear about what the Dogon people believe though - was the star and the mythology related to the star all made up by Griaule? Or did they have the mythology related to space people’s and Griaule showed them the star? What do the people believe now?
I actually have a legit question for the OP.
What was your purpose in starting this thread?
What were you trying to achieve here?
From your posts, you are personally convinced of the truth of Kuzari, for various reasons, none of which you are interested in debating about with the other participants in the thread.
Therefore, what we are left with is essentially you saying “I believe Kuzari is true” which is not exactly a debatable point.
What were you trying to accomplish?
Did you honestly think that by simply posting your own views and facts (using the term loosely here) and refusing to accept any counter-examples as valid or related to your original premise that you would end up changing people’s minds?
I am not trying to be sarcastic here - I’m honestly confused.
This is GD - DEBATES. People cannot debate if the original premise is off limits and one of the debaters will not accept any of the other side’s arguments.
Did you simply want to post your OP and have everyone come in and say “Oh, what a brilliant post, I never thought of it that way before - of course I agree with you.” ??
If that’s the case, then here is my capitulation - Your OP is correct. You do, in fact, believe Kuzari is true. Wonderful.
Otherwise, if you want to have a thread debate, you actually have to DEBATE with people, and not simply claim that everything they post is tangential to the point or unqualified to stand as an argument.
Meatros: I didn’t answer your point because I assumed you realized that the cases you cited were not nationally-experienced, nationally-commemorated events. Honestly, do you really think that the germans being anti-Semites is a national event? No. You were playing games. And I am not willing to play games. I take evidence seriously.
Second, regarding the Egyptians failing to record the Exodus. Now, you claim that this refutes Kuzari.
No it does not, it isn’t even relevant to Kuzari. Kuzari means that people won’t believe a false national history. The fact that the Egyptians didn’t record the Exodus DOES NOT IMPLY that they didn’t believe that the exodus happened, any more than the fact that they refused to record solar eclipses (so as not to offend the sun-god, presumably) does not imply that they did not believe in solar eclipses.
Okay - but I’m not entirely convinced that we should regard the biblical claim that the events were nationally experienced. I confess to not having read the prior thread and being new to this entire argument.
That said, it seems to me to be similar to Paul’s claim that 500 saw the risen Jesus.
It’s a claim in the book meant to bolster the authenticity of the very same book.
I’m also not quite sure about the distinction you are making between nationally experienced and nationally commemorated.
Technically, I don’t - the author who wrote it does. I find it persuasive.
This does not compute - this would regard the events relevant to the kuzari.
So your position is that an omitted history is not a false history?
?
I’m not playing games.
That said, I don’t think that all the germans were anti-semites. I would say that this was a ‘national’ (or state sponsored) belief.
I don’t believe the claim that all the ancient Hebrews believed this miraculous event. I would need evidence to believe that. I would need evidence that there was an event - what we currently have is evidence (Old Testament) that there was a belief in an event.
Once again:
A suggestion to everyone reading and/or participation in this thread
It is clear this thread meets none of the criteria of a debate. This has caused me, and I suspect others, a good bit of consternation.
However the forum description reads as follows (bolding mine):
I therefore suggest we view this discussion as what it truly is – witnessing. In that light, it is in the correct forum and the OP is responding exactly as expected.
Just a suggestion.
Oh well. Then, I have seen the light! Thank Og Almighty! I have seeeen the light!
Heh.
The creation of the Lakota and Dakota peoples in the Black Hills.
The battles between the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann.
The rise of the Romans, through Romulus, from the survivors of Troy.
Now turnabout is fair play: provide us with any examples of nationally experienced events that survived in accurate recital over hundreds of years without a written narrative or physical evidence. (Your constant odd appeals to the Temple of Solomon hardly qualify. Every hillside and tell in the Middle East with any sort of town atop it had a temple. “Remembering” a temple demonstrates only that every group accurately assumed that they actually had one.)
So? I am not concerned with miracles in any way. I note that there is testimony in Kings and Chronicles that the people had forgoten the Law, itself, the very heart of the Sinai story. If they “forgot” it, then when they were “reminded” about it, the story might have been true or it might have been invented; there would have been no continuous memory among the people regarding the features of the story. That means that your whole “It has to be true because the people would have remembered it” is built on an utterly false premise.
I read it. What you said there has no bearing on my point, here. In that thread you were arguing that the Torah had to have preceded the time of King Josiah. For the sake of argument, I am granting you that point, (whether or not I believe it). However, the story indicates that the Jewish people had forgotten the Torah. If they forgot it, then you no longer have a “continuous” memory of any event recorded in it. If they did not “forget” it, then your scripture is in blatant error, calling into question anything else it claims.
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The myths that you mention, do they claim the number of ancestor-witnesses, and, if so, do they number in the millions? Furthermore, were the millions of people who were believed to have see the mythological event commemorating the event from the time of the event?
Indeed, the fact that you mention those myths without mentioning the details of that myth show me that you hate, or are afraid of, the truth. -
Where does the story say that they forgot about the Torah? Even if a verse says that they forgot about the Torah – how does that imply in any which way that they forgot about their miraculous history? (These points are in addition to the points that I made in the previous thread which you failed to respond to fully)
So, you are going to set up a series of arbitrary rules that carefully exclude every group except your pet belief? Sorry, that is special pleading and I will dismiss that as more nonsense. Since youj appear to be the only one who actually believes the drek you are pushing, it is up to you to provide something persuasive in your arguments. So far, you have provided nothing that approaches such persuasion. “Hate” or “afraid of” the “truth”? Nah. You are simply displaying the sort of behavior that I have come to recognize among every Conspiracy Theorist or True Believer in nonsense. Nothing I believe would be harmed, in any way, if the Exodus story with the Sinai experience turned out to have a significant factual component. I accepted it as having a basis of fact for decades before I encountered enough evidence to persuade me that there was too little evidence. If such evidence was provided, then I would simply move my views back to that side of the equation without changing any of my overall views or beliefs. Your (Kurzari’s?) odd attempts to spin gold from straw don’t even come close.
Now, any plain reading of that text will indicate that neither Josiah nor his people had knowledge of the Law at the time that Josiah ordered his reforms. I am sure that you will supply some weird twist of logic or careful nitpick of language that will claim that the knowledge was there, but that they were just ignoring it, but that is not how the passage actually reads. On the oother hand, there is nothing in that passage that indicates that the people actually recalled hearing the story rom their ancestors. You simply are forced to be;ieve that in order to cling to your silly special pleading.
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No special pleading, as I’m sure you are aware. You can’t point to ONE national event - referring, for example, to the two people, Romulus and Remus, as a your example of a national event. Shame on you for trying to fool your unsuspecting audience, by not providing the specifics of the myths you provided.
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Where does it say that he “forgot about the Torah?” It merely means, AT MOST, that he never read the Torah. The reverse seems to be true, in fact. In verse 8, Hilkiah says “I found the book of the law,” which implies that everyone knew very well what the book was. Joshiah, since he grew up in a home infused with idolatry, was simply unaware of its contents. What was special about this Torah - as I mentioned before - was that it was written by Moses, and that it was found hidden in the Temple. It was hidden, because it was a special Torah.
Furthermore, you still haven’t shown me how Joshia forgot about their miraculous history?